Missing Person (3 page)

‘It’s a talkin’ parrot; Uncle Boots treated me.’ Cassie was a little breathless in her excitement of ownership. ‘Well, Freddy and me couldn’t afford it ourselves, so Uncle Boots paid. It wasn’t just because I’m pretty. Well, I don’t think it was, more because ’e’s nice, I think, and I told ’im I hope he lives happy ever after with ’is fam’ly and keeps all ’is own teeth.’

‘Don’t mind Cassie, Mrs Finch,’ said Freddy, ‘she likes goin’ on a bit. It’s turnin’ me a bit grey, but me mum thinks I’ll live.’

‘Well, we don’t want to lose you, Freddy,’ said Chinese Lady, ‘and nor do we want to stand about on the pavement when we’re supposed to be in Lyons havin’ a pot of tea and some buttered buns. Would you and Cassie like to come with us?’

‘Oh, yes, please,’ said Cassie. ‘Can I bring me parrot?’

‘Yes, come on, bring it,’ said Rosie.

‘Cassie, you can leave it with the shopkeeper,’ said Freddy.

‘It might prefer Lyons and a buttered bun,’ said Boots.

‘Oh, d’you think so?’ asked Cassie.

‘Let’s give him a go, shall we?’ said Boots, and off they all went, although Chinese Lady informed Mr Finch that it was just like Boots to think of having a parrot sit at the table with them. I expect he’ll want it to have a cup of tea with us, as well as peck at a bun,
she
said. Well, Maisie, said Mr Finch, human behaviour being what it is, we have to allow there’s a first time for everything. Chinese Lady said she’d never brought Boots up to make a spectacle of himself in a Lyons teashop. Emily, hearing that, laughed.

‘Oh, he caught this sort of complaint when he was young, Mum,’ she said, ‘and nobody’s been able to cure him.’

‘More’s the pity, then,’ said Chinese Lady.

Rosie, walking with Boots, whispered, ‘Daddy, you’re fun, and I don’t want anyone to cure you.’

‘Too late now, poppet, in any case,’ said Boots.

‘Oh, good,’ said Rosie.

The parrot, when Cassie removed the hood in Lyons, didn’t seem to think much of the place or the company. Cassie sat with the cage on her lap, encouraging the bird to say something. It cocked a supercilious eye at her.

‘Come on, Cecil,’ she said, ‘would you like a bit of me bun when it comes?’

‘You’re calling him Cecil?’ said Rosie.

‘Yes, I like Cecil.’

‘Cassie, nobody in Walworth calls anyone Cecil,’ said Freddy.

‘Nor my hamster,’ said Tim, the hutch on the floor beside his chair.

‘Cassie, what made you want a parrot?’ asked Emily.

‘There’s a lady that’s moved into the empty house near Freddy’s,’ said Cassie. ‘She’s got a parrot, and an ’usband and brother-in-law.’

‘Oh, that house has been taken now, has it?’ said Emily. Most of the family knew its history.

‘Yes, and it’s ’aunted, yer know,’ said Cassie.

‘Cassie, that’s only what the kids say,’ said Freddy.

‘Oh, all right,’ said Cassie blithely. ‘Cecil, you ’aven’t told us if you’d like a bit of me bun.’

Cecil emitted what sounded very much like a burp.

‘What was that for?’ asked Tim.

‘Indigestion,’ said Boots, ‘and that’s before he’s even seen a bun.’

Mr Finch cast an eye about in search of a Nippy. The teashop was fairly full, all Nippies busy. Chinese Lady asked Freddy what his new neighbours were like. Freddy said they’d come from the East End.

‘H’m,’ said Chinese Lady, who considered East End people not as respectable as they could have been.

Up came a Nippy with a pencil and pad. Mr Finch smiled at her.

‘Can I take your order, sir?’ she asked.

‘Push off,’ said Cecil.

And he said the same thing to Cassie’s family when she finally got him home.

‘
OH, NO YOU
don’t, get off!’ cried Miss Tilly Thomas, an unmarried young woman of twenty-six mindful, at this moment, of her virginity. And since she had recently seen a revival of the bloodcurdling Victorian melodrama,
Maria Martin And The Red Barn
, at the Elephant and Castle Theatre, she chose her next words in the manner of a Victorian virgin. ‘Unhand me, d’you ’ear, you villain?’

‘Come on, what’s a kiss and a bit of slap-and-tickle, eh, me beauty?’ said the villain of the moment, the man who rented the house in which she lodged in Brandon Street, Walworth. Burly bachelor George Rice reckoned he was entitled to a bit of what he fancied with his female lodger. After all, hadn’t he let her have her two rooms cheap, just six bob a week? And treating her to some lovey-dovey was doing her a favour. She wasn’t getting any from anyone else, stuck as she was at her sewing-machine at all hours, making clothes for her customers. What a figure, what a bosom, a real bit of all right she was. With his hands on her shoulders, he pulled her close. He bellowed then, for he received a punch in his paunch from her right knee. ‘Oh, yer bleedin’ vixen!’ he gasped, letting go of her shoulders to clasp his wounded
avoirdupois
.

‘Serve yer right,’ said Tilly, ‘I’m a – oh, yer swine!’

He’d grabbed her again.

‘I’ll learn yer,’ he growled, ‘and then treat yer to a bit of what I fancy. Come ’ere.’ He tightened his hold. Tilly, endowed with an abundant figure and no lack of vigour, kicked his shin with the pointed toe of her shoe. The pain crucified his leg for a suffering moment and he let go again, hissing with torment. ‘I’ll ’ave yer for that, I bleedin’ will,’ he gasped. Tilly picked a vase off her bedroom mantelpiece, and hit him with it as he came at her once more. It broke and shattered as it connected with his hard head. The blow staggered him and floored him. He rolled over, then sat up and clutched his bruised head. ‘Sod yer,’ he said in mangled fashion, ‘that’s yer lot, that is, yer fat ungrateful bitch.’

‘Fat? ’Ow dare you, you ’orrible ape!’ Tilly was furious at being called fat, when she simply had a fine, fulsome figure which she carried off well at her height of five-feet-eight. ‘It’s not your lot, mister, I tell you that. No, I ain’t finished with you, I’m goin’ out now to find a copper. I’ll give you assault me proud integrity.’

‘Copper my bleedin’ eye,’ growled George Rice, getting totteringly to his feet, ‘you just done me grievous bodily ’arm, you ’ave, and I could get yer six months for it. Ruddy ’ell, there’s blood as well.’

‘Think yerself lucky I didn’t knock yer ’orrible ’ead right off,’ said Tilly ferociously.

‘Yer finished ’ere. Finished. Out yer go. You got tomorrer to pack, then out yer go first thing Monday, bag an’ baggage. Got it?’

‘I wouldn’t stay ’ere, not if you paid me a fortune,’ said Tilly, ‘so put that in your pipe and smoke it. Now get out of me bedroom, or I’ll do you real injury with me poker.’

Growling, scowling, but wary of the poker, George
Rice
took himself and his bleeding head down to his kitchen. Tilly closed the door, put the poker back and sat down on the edge of her bed. She was shocked, but not downhearted. She had all the resilience of a born cockney. She’d left the family home in Peckham six months ago, mainly because she couldn’t get on with her step-mother. Her mum had died four years ago, and Tilly had stayed with her widower dad, her two sisters being married, while she herself was undergoing a prolonged courtship by Frank Golightly, a decent enough bloke who was always planning a wedding date without ever actually fixing it. She worked for a dressmaker, but if it hadn’t been for her dad, who needed someone about the house, she’d have left her job and forced Frank to fix a date. Then her dad was silly enough at the age of fifty-one to fall for a woman of thirty, and a bit of a tart in Tilly’s eyes. Dad had a fairly secure job with the council’s parks department, and that tart of a woman saw him as some kind of insurance, of course. Dad married her only a month after meeting her, and Tilly, high-spirited, was at loggerheads with her right from the start. To begin with, she was always showing her legs, especially if any of Dad’s men friends were present, or even Frank for that matter. Secondly, she soon made Tilly feel surplus to requirements, and it wasn’t long before Tilly told Frank she was leaving home, and that they might as well take the plunge and get married. Frank said he wasn’t quite set up for that, not quite yet. Probably in another six months, he said. Blow that, said Tilly, it’s now or never. We’ll see, said Frank, but in any case you can’t leave home, he said, it’ll make your step-mother think you don’t like her. I don’t, said Tilly. She’s a nice woman, said Frank. All right if you like them tarty, said Tilly. Don’t say things like
that
, said Frank, it ain’t nice, nor kind. You’ve got to stay, he said. Excuse me, said Tilly, but is that an order? Well, you’re me fiancée, said Frank, and I naturally expect you to observe me feelings and wishes. That got Tilly’s goat. I was your fiancée until a minute ago, I ain’t now, and here’s your ring back, which you can pop down me step-mother’s permanent cleavage and tickle her bumps with it, she said. You can follow it with your eyeballs, she said, seeing they’re nearly always popping out.

Frank thought she was joking and he forgave her for her unkind wordage. Tilly wasn’t joking, and nor was she in need of being forgiven. She left home a week later, moving to Walworth, having found two upstairs rooms in the house rented by George Rice in Brandon Street. She also left her job and started up on her own with the aid of a sewing-machine, a dummy and a lot of natural talent. She had to work hard because Walworth customers never had too much money to spare for new clothes, but she got by, and in any case hard work had never discouraged her. She was a strong young woman.

George Rice had been breezy, pleasant and friendly for the first few months. Then he began to get ideas. Tilly recognized the symptoms – those of a man who thought he had to be God’s gift to a woman living on her own. He’d made several passes at her, all of which she rebuffed. Tonight, just as she was about to get undressed for bed, he’d invaded the room. What an ’orrible villain. Tod Slaughter could have taken him off all right. Tod Slaughter had played the part of the fiendish squire, William Corder, in that Victorian melodrama.

Well, George Rice had finished up with a cracked head, and she had finished up resolved to depart his
door
and never return. She’d look in the newsagent’s window tomorrow and see who had rooms to let.

Cassie spent most of Sunday morning trying to extend her parrot’s vocabulary, but all it said in that time was a terse ‘Gertcher’. She tried again after dinner, with the cage on the kitchen table. Her dad, Harold Ford, known as the Gaffer, sat watching her, a grin on his face. For the umpteenth time she begged Cecil to say something. Cecil simply looked supercilious. The Gaffer, a widower, suggested she’d got herself a dud parrot.

‘No, I ’aven’t, Dad, he’s just not used to us yet.’

‘What made yer call ’im Cecil?’

‘Well, there was a Lord Cecil once, wasn’t there?’

‘It’s familiar, Cassie, familiar, I’ll say that much. Try callin’ ’im that, and see if he answers up.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Cassie. ‘Here, Lord Cecil, say ’ello, Your Ladyship.’

Lord Cecil tucked his beak into his plumage and fiddled about.

‘He don’t seem to be much of a lord,’ said the Gaffer.

Cassie frowned. Her eighteen-year-old sister Nellie was entertaining her young man in the parlour. Her sixteen-year-old brother Charlie, along with some of his mates, was making life burdensome for everyone in King and Queen Street. Cassie suddenly realized she hadn’t seen anything of Freddy all day. A parrot was all right, but it wasn’t the same as Freddy. Crikey, he might be giving some other girl a ride on his bike this minute, he might even be up the park with her, when he could be helping to get Cecil talking.

Putting the cover on, she picked up the cage and darted from the kitchen.

‘Where you off to, Cassie?’ called the Gaffer.

‘Round to see Freddy,’ said Cassie from outside the door.

‘Well, you be back by teatime, pet.’

‘All right, Dad. Can I bring Freddy to tea?’

‘Course you can. And yer parrot as well.’

Cassie scampered through the passage and out of the house, carrying the cage.

‘What yer got there, Cassie?’ bawled one of several street kids.

‘Me dad’s dustbin!’

‘You’re daft, you are, Cassie Ford!’

Cassie, turning at the corner of the street, whisked out of sight of the kids. When she reached Caulfield Place, she made straight for Freddy’s house. Pulling the latchcord, she let herself in.

‘Freddy, you home?’ she called.

‘No, not now,’ called Freddy, ‘I’m out.’

‘Come on, Cassie, come through,’ called Sally, Freddy’s sister, ‘don’t take any notice of young Clever Clogs.’

Cassie was at the kitchen door by then, anyway. In she went, with the cage. Sally, a typically lively cockney girl when she wasn’t putting on the style as a shop assistant, had a friend with her, Mavis Richards from Cotham Street. Both girls were in their Sunday best, ready to go out.

‘Oh, ’ello, Sally, how’d you do, Mavis, don’t you both look posh?’ said Cassie, rarely less than a blithe young spirit, even when her eyes were at their dreamiest. ‘Freddy, where you been all day?’

‘Well,’ said Freddy, ‘I was in bed till quarter-past eight, then I got up and ’ad a wash, then I got dressed and ’ad me breakfast, then I ’elped with the washin’-up, then I cleaned me bike – ’old on, is that that parrot you’ve brought?’

‘Yes, it’s Cecil, ’e wanted to come,’ said Cassie.

‘I suppose he asked to, did ’e?’ said Freddy.

‘Well, ’e didn’t exactly ask,’ said Cassie, ‘’e just looked as if ’e wanted to.’

‘Show, Cassie, show,’ said Sally, so Cassie placed the cage on the table and took the hood off. Cecil perked up at the sudden onset of light and did a cheeky one-step on his perch. His colourful plumage drew admiring cries from Sally and Mavis.

‘Oh, ain’t he pretty?’ said Mavis.

‘Gertcher,’ said Cecil.

‘Crikey, he talks,’ said Sally.

‘Yes, but ’e hasn’t said a lot today, not a tremendous lot,’ said Cassie, ‘so I’ve come to let Freddy ’elp me with ’is talkin’.’

‘Cassie, I ain’t keen on spendin’ me Sunday afternoon talkin’ to a parrot,’ said Freddy.

‘Come on, Cecil,’ said Sally, clicking her fingers, ‘say something else, like who’s a pretty boy, then.’